7. Guiding Principles

Reorient fully around customer experience

Marketing organisation leaders are reorienting operations completely around their customers. They’re building a more sophisticated and holistic view of behaviours, preferences and needs. They’re organising to translate data into insights – and to act on those insights with speed and agility. They’re prioritising personalisation, innovation and embracing experimentation. To close the gap on leaders, senior executives need to build a better understanding of their evolving customer. They need to reorganise and rebuild processes and culture around customers’ constantly shifting needs, motivations, expectations, preferences and behaviours.

Unleash your teams

Marketing organisation leaders are fully equipping teams to make decisions, learn from mistakes, iterate and experiment with autonomy and speed. To compete, senior executives must leverage tools and processes to connect vision to strategy, strategy to delivery, and strategic initiatives to experimentation. They must redouble efforts to build diverse and inclusive teams and grant those teams universal access to a single source of data truth. Senior executives should liberate their team members from routine and mundane tasks by capitalising on existing intelligent automation and by investing in the most valuable skills for an experience-driven future.

Think data action before data collection

Rising privacy consciousness is leading customers to question the trust they place in the data-value exchange. Organisations have a responsibility not only to protect customer data to the highest standards, but to use the data respectfully to create valuable customer experiences. Businesses need to take their role as data stewards very seriously, leveraging technology to ensure compliance across an increasingly fragmented and complex regulatory landscape. Data must be collected with the customer firmly in mind. How will the data captured today contribute to responsible, meaningful and helpful experiences for that customer tomorrow?

Organisations across the board are missing out on opportunities to maximise AI for improved audience understanding, faster insight to action and enhanced, personalised experiences at scale. This is major oversight. What’s more, AI-driven sales forecasting and micro-segmentation solutions aren’t the preserve of the most advanced or the most skilled organisations. They can be readily accessed and maximised by any savvy business to leapfrog the competition.

In this new era, shaped by customers’ digitally-rewired expectations and dictated by their new behaviours, businesses that get on the fast track, reorganise around the customer, empower their teams, instil trust and prepare the foundations for personalisation at scale will be the ones that thrive.

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